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He said: "When the plague was wiping out most of Europe, Edinburgh managed to survive a bit by just being utterly, utterly ruthless.

"Because they couldn't come up with any medicine they just decided to build a new Edinburgh on top of the old Edinburgh – and if you were ill they sort of bricked you into your house.

"The doctor would be round to check you one day, and would say 'I'll be back tomorrow to let you know what your diagnosis is'. Then you open up your door the next day and they would just be bricking you in saying 'sorry, it's real bad'."

He added: "There are also mass graves every couple of thousand feet. It was not a good time."

Sloss also discussed the origins of the term s***faced – and how it originated in Scotland – and told the famous story of Half-hangit Maggie "the woman who died twice".

Conan went on to say that the University of Edinburgh is considered one of the greatest medical universities of all time.

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And the comedian replied: "After the dark ages when Christianity essentially banned all sort of medicine and what not, Edinburgh was one of the first universities to start doing it again. But you can't test on a live body because that hurts – but what you can do is test on dead bodies.

"The fresher the body the better it is. So there were these two guys called Burke and Hare who started going grave-robbing to begin with. They'd literally wait until the funeral was one, and the family had left, and then they'd run in and get the body.

"Then they realised there was more money in fresher corpses than that and they became mass murderers."

Sloss' delivery prompted audience laughter, before Connan added that "killing people just to make fresh bodies" shows "initiative".

Chances are you've probably never seen an Edinburgh history lesson quite so dark, yet quite so funny, before – and you can watch it all in the video above.

The video was uploaded a matter of hours ago and has already racked up more than 30,000 views.

The comedian, who spent years living in Edinburgh and grew up in Fife, is a veteran of Conan O'Brien's talk show having appeared on it nine times.

He has been selling out massive arenas across the globe in recent times – and if you enjoy his brand of comedy you can catch him at the Playhouse in August.